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Welcome to the interactive glossay at Inside Computers. This glossary allows members of Inside Computers to post new definitions, allowing for collective information sharing.
If there is some acronym that most people might not know, or a special computer term which others would most likely want to know, go ahead and add it.
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| M | Magnetoresistive Heads :
A special type of read/write head used in hard drives, that allows for greater sensitivity, and thus a higher areal density. It uses two separate heads, one for reading, and one for writing. The reading head's electrical resistance changes whenever places in an electrical field, and this difference can be amplified.
Mainboard :
Another name for a motherboard.
Master Boot Record (MBR) :
The simple low level code which is contained in the first sector of storage mediums, like hard drives, CDs, floppy disks, that contains code on how to use and load information from that medium. It also contains other information about cluster sizes and partition information. This information is located in the first track at the beginning of the drive or disk.
META Tags :
HTML tags used for special information which is used by search engines for page classification.
Metaball :
3D modeling shapes which will gravitationally deform to attract to each other based on distances. They are often used for flowing, organically shaped objects.
Micron (micrometer) :
The standard measurement for transistor size. Current processors use a 0.18 micron transistor size. A micron is 10-6 meters, or one 1um. One inch is equal to exactly 25400 micrometers.
Microsoft :
The company responsible for the most popular operating system in the world, Windows.
MIP Mapping :
Short for Multum in Parvum, which is Latin for 'many in one'. This is the 3D video process where many different scaled images are used for the same texture. Objects which are further away are mapped with a smaller scale texture than the images which are closer. This saves on memory bandwidth and also improves quality.
Motherboard :
The large PCB board that has the chipset, controllers and all of the computer connectors. All components are connected to the motherboard, opposed to a daughter board connecting to a connection.
Motion Blur :
A visual effect of creating a blur in moving objects to prevent jerky and shutter effect movements.
Motion Capture :
The technique of studying the movement of real people or objects to create more real character animations in computer games or simulations.
Motion Compensation :
The process of improving video quality by smoothing and accurately compensating for the fine movement limitations that compression algorithms have.
Motion Pictures Expert Group (MPEG, MPEG1, MPEG2, MPEG3) :
The organization that was responsible for the standardization of the MPEG codecs.
Multicast :
A networking term for a packet which has multiple recipients. The contrast of unicast.
Multimedia :
The term used to describe anything that has to do with both audio and video.
Multimedia Extensions (MMX) :
The unofficial name for the 57 MMX instructions which were added to the Pentium that increased its multimedia performance when used effectively. All new x86 chips since have had MMX instructions included.
Multiread :
CD-ROM and DVD-ROM devices that are able to read all of the disk formats, including: CD, CD-R and CD-RW.
Multitexturing :
The process of applying two or more textures to a single polygon or pixel. This is commonly done by having one image as the surface texture, and one image as a lightmap to simulate light effects. This saves on texture space, instead of having a complex texture for each light, a simple greyscale image is used over a repeating texture image. Most video card pipelines are able to map 2 or 3 textures to a single pixel every clock cycle.
Multithreading :
The ability to do multiple tasks at the same time. Most often referrers to software programming. Single threaded programs are linear in nature and have to happen in ordered steps. All DOS programs are single threaded. Multithreaded programs use multiple threads to do multiple tasks at once. A program like a CD player can display an equalizer and play music at the same time.
Musical Instrument Digital Interface (MIDI) :
A sound file that uses digital sounds installed in the sound card. A MIDI file actually doesn't contain any music, but is a set of functions such as note, tone, time, instrument, volume, etc, which trigger the sound card to produce sounds. The quality of the MIDI file is dependent on the digital samples the sound card is using. Because a MIDI file is only sound triggers, it is extremely small in file size, but it is limited to music played only by instruments.
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